About this blog

I'm a well-known mainframe performance guy, with almost 30 years of experience helping customers manage systems. I also dabble in lots of other technology. I've sought to widen the Performance role, incorporating aspects of infrastructural architecture.

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A while back I set myself a technical challenge: To learn how to program an Android device.
NOTE: I don't have a real application in mind, just idle curiosity and a degree of annoyance at the prerequisites to be able to program an iPhone (apart from as a WebApp).
Here's what I did and how I've got on:
My Equipment
I bought the cheapest Android tablet I could find. It's an... [More]

Over the weekend I decided to try my hand at writing a JSON parser in REXX. I developed the technique outlined in this post to enable me to do that. I think it's new. Certainly I've not seen it before.
(I don't want at this point to get into a discussion about why JSON parsing might be a useful thing to do. Suffice it to say it is possibly going to be second only to XML as a common data... [More]

Many of you will have, by now, installed the Adobe AIR runtime. Most probably it will be to run something like Twhirl. At this point many of you will be asking "what's Twhirl?" If I said it was a nice desktop application that makes using Twitter so much easier I hope you don't ask "what's Twitter?" :-) So, we're beginning to see these desktop applications coded using Adobe AIR, which stands for... [More]

Some time ago a colleague pointed Scratch out to me. It's a programming environment for children. When I was a kid I kind of learnt programming from the Elsevier Monographs my Dad had on his bookshelf. He (who's probably going to read this) gave them to me for safekeeping some time ago. So I count HIM as my first bad influence. :-) But he did insist on STRUCTURED programming, so maybe he's a GOOD... [More]